No, you’re not seeing things! He, who hates messy play. He, who wouldn’t touch the fingerpaint or spaghetti paint, has busted out of his comfort zone, gotten paint on his hands and enjoyed it!
This wasn’t the plan, but of course I’m not complaining at all.
It all started with a humble sponge and a string bag from a bag of oranges.
I wrapped it tightly around the sponge with some string…
And we had mesh dab printing, ready to go!
Don’t stress, it’s an old plate…
Printing is a marvelous way for children to apply trial and error to their painting. They learn via cause and effect what will happen if they use something patterned such as a mesh-covered sponge to print onto paper.
It’s a nice, ‘safe’ way to get a child who doesn’t like mess on their hands to have a try at using paint. As Mr 4 has shown us, sometimes all it takes is the need to feel comfortable first, then it’s time to dive in. I think it also helped that his little sister was already using the paint for hand prints anyway, so he felt happy to try what she was doing.
How does your child feel about messy play? Do they love it, or does it bother them?
Time for some messy play again! This time, I have mixed cooked spaghetti with fingerpaint for some squishy, slimey, squoozy fun.
(If you’d like a printout of the fingerpaint recipe, you can download it along with recipes for cooked and uncooked playdough.)
Spaghetti paint is great because it doesn’t cost much and uses ingredients most people usually have in their pantry. It is an excellent activity for sensory exploration. Children can enjoy the smell, the slimy feeling, talk about if it is warm or cold and how wet it is.
It encourages much social and language interaction between children and adults alike. Children can experiment with the paint by either handling it on its own or smearing it around on a piece of paper.
Don’t worry if the paper gets holes in it, always remember that children care about and need the process, not the product.
You can see in the photo above how a child could find out what the paint looks like if they lift the spaghetti off the paper – beautiful swirls!
Mr 4 isn’t a huge fan of messy play, but he liked watching this activity, which is a big improvement. Missy 2, however was willing to have a try. If only Missy 10 were home to really get up to her armpits in this mess. In fact, I think I’ll have to let her when she gets home from school.
(Note: if you are considering using this in a preschool or a daycare setting, please be sensitive to the fact that food play is offensive to some cultures. When in doubt, check first.)
What messy things have your children been up to lately?
I was outside picking more lavender for drying, only to discover that the daisies growing next to the lavender were growing out of control. It seemed such a waste to just leave them there, so I picked lots of daisies and brought them inside to put in vases, and do some fun things with the kids.
Missy 10 was keen to try my idea of giving the daisies a coloured water ‘drink’. We recycled the water from the spray paint we made, as you can see in the photo above.
Missy 2 saw the goings-on, and wanted to imitate what we were doing. So, I found a disposable plastic cup from Missy 10′s birthday party and taped it to the table. I then gave her a glut of daisies to put into the cup, then take them out, then put them in. Much like posting. She was in heaven and this kept her busy for at least an hour.
She had a ball walking around with her bouquet and showing everybody in the house what she’d been doing.
Once the novelty of that wore off, I made some daisy chains for her to wear on her head. Weekend play at its best.
This is how Missy 10′s daisies look now:
If the colour gets any deeper, I’ll show how they turn out.
Missy 9 made this beautiful butterfly. Playdough appeals to all ages.
Home playdough is special. There’s no denying it. Sure, it’s fun for kids to play with the store-bought stuff, but there’s nothing like the smell of freshly cooked playdough to bring back fond childhood memories. When I smell it, I remember our old Playgroup hall and I can hear the noisy feet of my peers echoing on the floorboards. I hear table legs screeching as mums drag them away from the walls and set them up for us to play happily at.
What I love about making playdough yourself is that you get so much more to play with than what you’d buy in a lousy, plastic playdough can. It’s also great that it costs next to nothing to make. Playdough brings many benefits to the child, apart from being messy, good fun.
Playdough helps children to:
- strengthen and develop fine motor skills (use of hands)
- engage in creative play
- play dramatically, as they make up stories about what they’re making. It’s common to hear children making up pretend voices of their creations’ characters.
- develop their cognitive skills. Children use trial and error, cause and effect and basic experimentation to manipulate the dough into what they want it to do. They learn to problem solve.
- further develop their language. Children love to talk about what they are doing with their sculptures, and this in turn allows them to socialise with other children or adults.
- experiment with different tools and learn about how they work.
- watch how colours change when they are mixed together
How to cook playdough
You will need:
4 cups of water
4 tablespoons of cooking oil
4 cups of plain flour
8 tablespoons of cream of tartar powder
2 cups of salt
Dump all the ingredients into a large saucepan or frypan. I like this gigantic non stick electric frypan, because it’s less likely to spill over. Before you turn the heat on, mix it well. It should look like this:
Turn the heat on to medium-low (my frypan heats up very rapidly, so I have to watch this. You don’t want it to burn or develop a crust along the bottom). It will start to thicken and look lumpy. This is normal.
Now, just stir constantly until it is a lovely, firm playdough consistency. Put it aside to cool before adding any goodies to it.
Once it’s cool, there’s so many things you can add to your playdough. Kool Aid can be used to colour it, or food colouring. You can even try beetroot or spinach juice if you and your kids are feeling experimental!
But don’t feel that you have to stop at colour. Sight is just one of our senses. Why not appeal to your child’s sense of touch, with some glitter shaken in, or some coloured rice? To colour the rice before adding it, shake some rice and food colouring together in a jar and spread it out to dry before adding it. It looks best if the playdough colour is a contrast to the colour of the rice. Below is red and yellow food colouring added to rice.
It looks pretty, but children enjoy the granular sensation, and they notice a difference when flattening it with a rolling pin, or cutting it with a knife or a cookie cutter. This in turn often leads to much discussion! Why not throw some hundreds and thousands in for a mighty crunch? Then the children can watch the colours blend.
And what of our sense of smell? I’ve already mentioned how pleasurable the smell of playdough can be for a child (or adult. Ahem), so play around with that, if you will. You could make coffee playdough, mint scented playdough, just look around your kitchen and garden to see what you have.
The batch in the picture below has been mixed with Kool Aid and coffee, to encourage the children to experiment with different smells. We have cherry flavour, grape, tamarindo, lime, and raspberry. This cooked playdough recipe makes a large amount, so it’s excellent if you want a large variety of playdough types, or have a lot of kids using it either at home, playgroup or daycare.
Uncooked playdough
Sometimes, you might just want playdough quickly, and couldn’t be bothered cooking it, waiting for it to cool, yadda yadda, yadda… Or your kids might be keen to help you make it. Or, you might be at Playgroup and want to quickly make some for the kids, and not have time to cool it down before using it. My uncooked playdough recipe is handy for those times.
You will need:
3 cups of plain flour
1/3 cup of salt
1 and 1/4 cups of water
Plain flour for dusting
Colouring of your choice
Mix the first three ingredients together with your hands. Then turn it out onto a bench dusted with flour, and knead it until you are happy with its consistency. It should be just like bread dough.
Separate into the desired amount you’d like for each colour, then knead the food colouring through. Or you can use some of the suggestions mentioned in the cooked playdough recipe.
One thing that’s lovely about uncooked playdough, is that if children make it, they can give it to friends or family as a nice little homemade gift. We kneaded a little glitter through part of the batch for a little extra sparkle.
Fun ways to play with it.
The ideas here are endless, but I’m going to give you some good ones to get you all fired up.
- using bare hands only.
- rolled into ‘sausages’ and children encouraged to cut it into pieces with scissors. This is an excellent way to familiarise children with scissor use and strengthen their little muscles in preparation. It’s also much easier to cut playdough with scissors than paper when a child is starting to learn.
- provide an old garlic press and let the kids watch the playdough squish out like spaghetti. Again, this is great for fine motor strength.
- raid your useful box for straws, lids, cupcake cases etc for your children to add to their play.
- give your children rolling pins and cookie cutters to play with. We’ve not unpacked our rolling pin since the move yet, so I improvised and gave the kids this empty tissue cylinder.
Make sure to store your playdough in some cling wrap or a sealed plastic container. It’s great to encourage the kids to help pack up, too!
Mr 4′s caterpillar. He became deeply engrossed in this activity.
Now, to make life a little bit easier for anyone who likes to make their own playdough or fingerpaint, not only can you find the recipes at Hear Mum Roar, you can also download them in a handy printable format to keep in the kitchen. Click here to download.
I’d love to hear what your kids like to do with their playdough.
Edited to add: Here’s where Aussies can source Kool Aid (not sponsored links, just adding on request):
Missy Two has been a real, typical toddler of late, in the games she likes to play. I mentioned recently how she loves to post things, and here’s another example of a toddler classic: the pull along toy. It doesn’t have to be a store-bought toy, you could make something similar for your child out of the useful box.
Gumboots and underpants worn over jumpsuits are the latest in winter fashion. Just sayin’, in case you didn’t know…
Examples of pull along play can be a bunch of train carriages, a car on a string, this walk-along puppy you see, heck, we even have a pull-along elephant that has been handed down to us! It’s good if the string isn’t too long, so that they can’t wrap it around their necks too easily and strangle themselves. If your child has made up a game with something that is too long, you’ll need to supervise. But you guys know that, right? Yeeah…
The appeal of simple games such as pulling things along is the basic repetition. Toddlers love repetition. Missy Two will pull this puppy loudly along our floor boards back and forth…
They like the sound the wheels make (if it has wheels, most pull along toys do, but homemade toys might not), learning about the concept of pulling, enjoying the challenge of trying to keep the toy steadily upright (in the case of wheels, generally) whilst pulling at the same time. It encourages a certain level of coordination, as the child looks back to check the toy is how they want it to be, they keep moving as they walk, and they work out, via trial and error, how to do this without the toy coming up off the floor. Whew! That’s hard work!
As they gain competence at this simple task, they will repeat it over and over again, for the sheer joy of it all.
My older two children are still enjoying pull along toys also. But in a different way. They like to sit on top of our pull along elephant, as our puppy pulls them along by the string! So cute, and it gets a lot of giggles out of the kids.
Do you have anything your kids like to use as pull along play?
So, you may have just read my post about how we decluttered a bunch of plastic out of our kitchen. Missy 2 spontaneously started posting with a container that has a pour spout on it.
What is posting? Well, it couldn’t be simpler. It’s putting something in a hole. I’m ignoring your snickers by the way, this is a family site! Hehe.
Toddlers love the repetition of putting in one object after another, taking them all out, starting again.
A toddler can learn so much from such a simple task. They enhance their eye-hand co-ordination, they learn about concepts such as ‘in’, ‘out’, ‘through’, ‘push’ and sometimes, ‘open,’ ‘close’. If an adult talks with them about what they are doing, they can reinforce the words as a language experience. Posting can take on a dramatic part in childrens’ play, too.
Do you have anything around the house that your toddlers play posting activities with? The ideas are endless!
This is a nice, simple, open-ended media that kids can paint on. Here is a canvas my eldest daughter painted that is now a cherished gift at her grandparents’ house.
Visitors love to admire it and talk about what they see in it, often. It’s also a lovely way for parents to decorate the home, capturing a time, an age, a memory. Best of all, they are cheap and easy to buy! Here’s some painted canvases we’ve done over the years:
Have you ever given your children canvas to work with? Next time you’re stuck for a gift, you could give this a try.
Welcome to the June Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival, ‘Kids and Learning.’
The Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival hosted by Science@home is for anyone, because we are all teachers and learners all the time. This month our theme is “Art” which doesn’t just mean doing craft – it includes music, performance art and appreciation as well! Our bloggers have come up with many different thought-provoking takes on this theme. Please read through to the end to find links to the other participating blogs.
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Hey guys! I’ve done a little experiment with my kids and videotaped the results for you to watch. It’s all about structured art activities versus open-ended ones. Please bear with me, as, apart from my sponsored review videos I’ve done and little home videos, this is my first ‘put together’ video, just for you. In a few places, it’s wrongly cropped, in many places, my hand is unsteady, but I’m please to have finally built up the courage to give it a go. My kids and I also had a lot of fun doing this. I look forward to your reactions, so please share!
I hope you will go check out all the blog posts in this great carnival.
Visit Science@home to find out more about the Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival.
Please take the time to visit the other participants and check out their posts on “Art.”
CatWay at Adventures With Kids is getting the most out of a trip to the art gallery with ideas of how to prepare children and interest them while they are there.
Mamapoekie from Authentic Parenting argues for the importance of art and why we should be encouraging it as our children get older.
Miss Carly from Early Childhood Resources talks about how to create an environment that encourages young children to explore art.
Sharon at Hear Mum Roar has done a fantastic video post by getting her children to do an activity two different ways and letting you see the very different results.
Amanda at HomeAge has been admiring art with her daughter since she was a baby, taking her to several art exhibitions and reading books.
Kate from Picklebums talks about why art is important for little people and has a huge list of activities you can try.
The Planning Queen from Planning With Kids has tips for visiting the art gallery with kids, including links to different galleries and some ideas for activities afterwards.
Colin Wee at Super Parents is thinking about his son’s musicality as he learns to play the violin.
Deb from Science@home has her children investigating materials while making sculptures and bravely let the 2 year old use a hot glue gun.
Leechbabe from Stuff with Thing started out looking at patterns in nature, but the activity changed because she followed her children’s lead.
Monique at Your Cheeky Monkey has used an indoor activity, giving her children magazines to cut out and create collages.
Thanks for visiting, we hope you enjoy some of the posts in our carnival.
Sponsored by Nuffnang
It’s time for another Mattel review! Last time it was the adorable Flip Phone, and this time we were lucky enough to receive the Peek a Boo clock in the post. You can imagine how excited my little ones were. In case you can’t imagine, you can watch Missy Two’s reaction below.
The Peek a Boo clock is so cute! It has so many surprises for children to enjoy. This toy is aimed at children aged six months to three years old. You can press the green button on the top of the clock to see a little bird pop out of the door (just like a cuckoo clock) and light up brightly. Each time it pops out, it makes a different sound. Some of the sounds are:
Peek a boo! I see you!
Cuckoo!
Hello! Then when the door closes again, good bye!
It also plays a variety of songs when the bird pops out. My daughter also likes to pull the door open to make the bird pop out, and this is easy to do, as it has an indent for little fingers.
Little kids can turn the handles on the clock, and in the centre of the handles, is a little light-up button. This also plays a huge number of songs, Mr Three’s favourites being the alphabet song and the counting one. He enjoyed reading the alphabet displayed along the top of the toy, and counting the numbers on the clock.
There is a little disc on the side at the top, that displays a sun and a moon as you turn it, to represent day and night. Of course, this cool clock takes it one further, and actually says ‘day’ and ‘night’ at the right times! There is a little spot on the other side with little sliding shapes for the younger babies to play with; my two year old still enjoyed looking at those, too. On the other side is a key that makes a rewarding clicking noise when the child turns it.
I found even Missy Nine really thought it was cute and enjoyed playing with it, too. Her and Mr Three took turns at holding it facing each other and saying, ‘now I’m going to put on a show with the clock, who wants to watch?’ In this household, the more kids who enjoy one toy, the better. Because there’s a large age gap between Missy Nine and the younger two, it’s nice when no one feels left out. Plus, I always feel if all the children get some enjoyment out of our toys, then we’re getting good value.
I was so impressed with this clock. I love the fact that the volume can be adjusted, and that it explores the concept of cause and effect with my children. The most important thing to me is that my kids like it, and if you watch my little video below, you will see how much Missy Two loved it, and hear her squeals of delight.
